HARARE – Pressure groups are urging the diaspora, whose remittances are key to keeping the regime’s crippled economy staggering on, not to send forex home, saying it is bought up outside Western Union and on the street by Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe runners.
“I know it is a big ask to have families that have USD, GBP, ZAR not to send some home. But people must realise that all that money is going to funding the regime,” said a pressure group organiser, who cannot be identified because of reprisals from the ever-more violent Mugabe dictatorship.
“The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe is currently surviving mostly on black market-purchased forex, black market-purchased gold and ‘negotiated’ (black market rates) currency exchange deals with exporters, notably the platinum concentrate exporters,” he added.
It is widely acknowledged that much of the forex sent into Zimbabwe is exchanged by desperate relatives for the virtually worthless dollar notes being churned out by the RBZ with huge rows of naughts on each note. Several billion, for example, might buy a pint of milk – if available.
RBZ Governor Gideon Gono brushed aside the decision announced July 1 by a German firm, Giesecke and Devrient, to stop forthwith supplying paper used by the RBZ to print these notes, saying vaguely he would fine a way round it. He added, without apparent irony, that the German move will not “disrupt the smooth flow of business.”
On the assumption that most of the three million Zimbabweans living in exile send home an average of US $50 a month, that comes to around US $150 million a month, compared with gold production now down to about US $12 million a month.
The activists urge Zimbabweans to stop selling forex on the black market, saying most of it goes back to the RBZ “to feed the ZNA, ZRP and Grace.” Those who have to change forex should do it via TT offshore with a direct importer.
If possible go to South Africa or Botswana, change forex there, and buy groceries locally, they say. Instead of sending cash, expatriates should pay for fuel and food in the UK and South Africa.
“When you send cash to Zimbabwe to help fee your extended family, or pay their medical bills (as a result of a Zanu (PF) beating) or even worse for a funeral, the irony is that those pounds, US dollars or rands are going straight to the RBZ (via RBZ buyers outside Western Union, street vendors and Premier Bank etc.) and this diaspora forex is paying for vehicles and fuel for Zanu (PF) to carry out more beatings and murders.” Â
Heritage of ANC political-criminal networks during apartheid must end
PAUL TREWHELA was a political prisoner in South Africa between 1964 and 1967. He writes that the ANC in exile during apartheid years obliterated the distinction between crime and politics to fund its political and military operations, and this practice continued in the minds of ANC cadres after the party gained power in 1994. He argues that the jailing in 1986 for two years of two white Zimbabwean customs officials, John Vincent Austin and Neil Harper, on the orders of State Security Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa was because they got in the way of this ANC exile traffic. These are extracts from his article.
LONDONÂ -Â There is information suggesting that a stable system of organised crime was in place in Umkhonto weSizwe in exile during the 1980s, involving the smuggling of gems and drugs in convoy from Luanda in Angola southwards through Western Province in Zambia through Katima Mulilo into Botswana and thus into South Africa, with a return transit traffic of “German take-aways” (luxury BMW and Mercedes Benz cars) towards the north.
Some of these stolen cars would have been sold in order to provide funds for the organisation (and appropriate individuals); others would have served as the official vehicles of high-placed political appointees.
These were not one-off operations but followed a systemic pattern.
A very wide range of ANC exiles were aware of these operations, which were routed through the ANC Security Department.
Members of the ANC in exile regarded this traffic in a positive light, as a revolutionary means of funding the organisation at the expense of “the enemy” (though some may have demurred at the role of drugs as central to this traffic).
Certain senior leaders of the ANC in exile could only have known about and sanctioned this traffic.
Effectively, the ANC (and with it, Umkhonto weSizwe) operated in Angola, Zambia, Tanzania and other states as a “state-within-a-state”. Generally the rule of law and normal state boundaries and controls had no relevance in these recently-independent states. Throughout the region, the ANC was a law unto itself. Once it had committed itself to criminal traffic on an “industrial” or even “commercial” scale, linking crime within South Africa to the region as a whole, it faced no restraint whatsoever from regional governments.
As a “body of armed men” (to use Engels’s definition of the state), the ANC in exile conducted a regional criminal operation reaching across the sub-continent.
It is most likely that this criminal operation was supervised by the South African state security forces of the apartheid regime, as a means of penetration and control of the ANC.
There was likely to have been a stable, ongoing set of secret relationships binding top ANC officials responsible for administering this network with top-level criminals within South Africa as well as a range of white and black security officials of the apartheid regime, extending right to the top of that structure.
Very ruthless and powerful men controlled this network, and most likely continue to control operations of this kind. They would not hesitate to use extreme violence to preserve secrecy.
There is no possibility of achieving a law-bound, civic society in South Africa and throughout the region until the noxious heritage of the political/criminal networks of the apartheid period have been identified and rooted out. It will be a devilishly difficult task.
Post published in: News